Polarization coincidence images from metasurfaces with HOM-type interference

Metasurfaces provide a promising route for structuring light and generating holograms with designed amplitude, phase, and polarization profiles, leading to a versatile platform for integrating and constructing optical components beyond the conventional ones. At the same time, incorporating coincidence in imaging allows a high signal-to-noise ratio for imaging in very low light levels. As beneficial from the recent development in both metasurfaces and single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) cameras, we combine the polarization-sensitive capability of metasurfaces with Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM)-type interference in generating images with tailor-made two-photon interference and polarization coincidence signatures. By using orthogonal linear-polarized photons as incidence, correlated, anticorrelated, and uncorrelated polarization coincidence features can be observed within the same image from the pairwise second-order coherence statistics across different pixels of the image. Our work adds polarization to the demonstrated amplitude and phase sensitivity in the domain of “HOM microscopy” and can be useful for biological and security applications.